Joseph Harrington is a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and an expert on extrasolar planets. He was not part of the research team.

He said transiting planets are "really important" because they allow scientists to increase understanding of planets elsewhere in the universe as well as our own solar system.

"Whenever you learn about familiar things in exotic environments, it really opens up your thinking and understanding of familiar things in familiar environments," he said.

Exotic Ice

Knowing the size and mass of the planet allowed the team to infer it is mainly composed of water, based on models developed by Jonathan Fortney at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

If the planet contained mostly hydrogen and helium, like Jupiter, it would be much larger. And if it were made of rock and iron, it would be much smaller, like Earth and Mars, according to the model.

Since the planet orbits so close to its star, astronomers expect a minimum surface temperature of 475 degrees Fahrenheit (245 degrees Celsius).

And, the astronomers said, pressures within the planet are intense, allowing for the exotic "hot ice."

As it does in a swimming pool, pressure on planets increases with depth. Since the planet is thought to be primarily a water world, the pressure acts on the water.

"Water has more than a dozen states, only one of which is familiar ice," Frédéric Pont, a study co-author from the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, said in a statement.

"Under very high pressure, water turns into other solid states denser than both ice and liquid water, just as carbon transforms into diamond under extreme pressures," he added.

Inside the planet, the researchers said the exotic ice is heated to several hundred degrees.

The planet is likely enveloped by hydrogen or helium, like Neptune or Uranus, but could be surrounded by water vapor, the team added. (See an interactive map of our solar system.)

Harrington, in Orlando, said the team's calculations and characterization of GJ 436 b appear accurate.

"This planet should have a substantial component of its interior, maybe even most of it, being made of this solid form of water," he said.

Ocean Planets

The ability to detect GJ 436 b with ground-based telescopes suggests it only a matter of time until astronomers detect Earthlike planets with this method, Gillon said.

He and his colleagues are re-examining nearby planets like GJ 436 b that were first detected by the way they tug on their parent stars, a technique called radial velocity.

"As more and more smaller rocky planets are detected by radial velocity, the probability that one of them is transiting its star increases," Gillon said.

"So we will get for sure in the near future the transits of a terrestrial planet."

The team is focused on small, cool faint stars like GJ 436 b's host star. These so-called red dwarfs make up 75 percent of the stars in the Milky Way.

"If by chance we detect a transiting terrestrial planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a tiny nearby red dwarf, the near-to-come James Webb Space Telescope could even be able to detect traces of life in its atmosphere," he said.